Surveillance Education

“Convenience, support, and safety: Advocates of digital surveillance promise tempting solutions to fundamental challenges in K-12 and higher education. But at what price? In Surveillance Education, Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler expose how ed-tech companies violate students’ privacy, thwart their learning, and profit from collection of their data. Drawing on interviews with teachers, administrators, government officials, and students, Surveillance Education mobilizes insights from critical media literacy to make practical recommendations for enhancing privacy, trust, and equity as foundations for resistance to the inappropriate use of surveillance tech in our schools.”

Andy Lee Roth, associate director of Project Censored

“While much is written about the harmful effects of digital devices and social media on young people’s mental health, far less attention is paid to the ways a multitude of technologies are used to monitor, observe, and control children, teenagers, and young adults. In this well-researched and insightful book, Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler reverse the lens on the surveillance education industries by subjecting their motivations, methods, and goals to inquiry and analysis informed by the traditions of critical theory, critical pedagogy, and critical media literacy. In democratic societies, the right to privacy is as essential as the right to speak, and education is central to the development of a knowledgeable citizenry and a primary locus for the socialization of our youth. Higdon and Butler’s research raises important questions about how our educational institutions may be hindering the development of democracy by normalizing surveillance and treating students as objects of suspicion rather than autonomous members of a democratic citizenry. If you are a student, a parent, an educator, an activist, a legislator, or simply a human being that cares about justice, equality, and freedom, Surveillance Education is an important book, a necessary and compelling read, and, potentially, the first step in an intervention that can begin to challenge the for-profit surveillance industries and their allies.”

Bill Yousman, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Sacred Heart University, USA

"Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools by Critical Media Literacy scholars and activists, Nolan Higdon and Allison Butler, is an essential read for anyone concerned with how privacy, free speech, and trust are being systematically eroded within the evolving landscape of K-12 and higher education in the digital age. Higdon and Butler offer a compelling examination of the legal, social, cultural, political, economic and pedagogical implications of the Trojan horse of digital technologies. They shine a light on the unequal exchange of streamlined administrative processes and classroom accessibility and sometimes safety for access to the data of minors by government and corporate third parties. Using a Critical Media Literacy framework, drawing on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), and using historical examples of the government surveillance of student activists from the Vietnam War era to the present, Higdon and Butler critique the consequences of the neoliberalization and hyper-privatization of public education. This is a brave new world where earnest DEI initiatives are unknowingly undermined by algorithms of oppression and the implied consent of minors who only wish to learn offers a springboard to detrimental market and government policy initiatives that undermine the strength of their communities. And just when it seems darkest and most dystopian in the panopticon of digital surveillance, Higdon and Butler provide a detailed plan of resistance for educators, parents, and policymakers committed to safeguarding the future of our educational institutions and our participatory democracy and they provide hopeful examples of successful community action as a blueprint for future struggles.

Nicholas L. Baham III, Professor of Ethnic Studies, California State University East Bay, USA

“Often presented as innovative and essential for quality education, this book shows us the dark underside of surveillance technology, exposing its intrusive and destructive effects on students and creative learning. This revelatory text is exciting and ultimately uplifting as it shows us a pathway to a new pedagogy free of these oppressive constraints.”

Robin Andersen, Professor Emerita of Media Studies, Fordham University, USA

"Engagingly written and supported by detailed empirical data, Surveillance Education is an urgent text for our times. It documents the latest stage in the increasing invasion of our public institutions by private interests, and the ever more intricate surveillance of young people, and indeed of teachers. While the situations it describes are sometimes quite horrifying, it also offers a potential way forward, in the form of critical media literacy. This is very much necessary reading!"

David Buckingham, Honorary Professor, Institute of Education, University College London, UK